


Restoration: The Manual on Utter Destruction of Castles, Disappointing Princes, and other Customary Mishaps

by fourfreedoms



Category: Paper Bag Princess - Robert Munsch
Genre: Coda, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:43:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourfreedoms/pseuds/fourfreedoms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story of Princess Elizabeth's triumphs and tribulations with scale models, a dragon's fashion sense, and putting castles any other place but swamps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Restoration: The Manual on Utter Destruction of Castles, Disappointing Princes, and other Customary Mishaps

**Author's Note:**

  * For [team_fen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/team_fen/gifts).



> When I saw this pinch I knew I had to take it. I had more on my plate this Christmas season than I initially anticipated, but still I found myself claiming it. Thanks so much for putting ideas in my head and thanks also to my RL bff for going over it when I was flipping out over it in a cafe at 6:30 PM, only hours away from the deadline.

She’s never been one of those people who compete over their suffering—possibly because the worst she’d suffered was a swallowed fishbone from the royal Swordfish or accidentally tearing the knees out of her favorite stockings. But now, if she were to enter into a misery competition, she would be the favorite to win. Pile of rubble for a castle, paper bag for a wardrobe, piece of crap for a prince—and that’s only the beginning. Where is the bloody manual for this situation? Likely in ash, because the library’s been knocked flat and roasted for kindling. 

Where does one even start? Trying to rebuild is all well and good, until your nearest neighbor country sends you the bill for the destruction of their royal forests, and Duke So-and-so, a man you never liked, is trying to sue you for pain and suffering at the sight of a tremendous fire-breathing dragon flying over his house, not just once, but on three solitary separate occasions. 

She’s not exactly sure what she’s supposed to do about her new found legal mishaps. Her attempt to reacquire her possessions began and ended with her paper bag. For that matter, she’s not even sure how they found her. It’s not like she’s got a deliverable address these days, and the ruins of her blighted castle are still too smelly and smoky to brave at this early stage. She was rather enjoying her freedom from it all, and then the first of many messengers showed up trying to collect various damages and indemnities. 

If Princess’s don’t wear paper bags, they certainly don’t swear, but at this point she thinks that’s all she’s got in the form of payment. If she had paper to write it on, she’d send them a dictionary’s worth of epithets and curses. But alas, then she’d have to give up her dress, and while it’s not like she’s got a surplus of dignity laying in store, it’s too goddamned cold to be running around in just her dented crown. 

She decides to start small. A tree house maybe or princess-sized beaver lodge. There’s certainly enough lumber lying around, blackened though it may be. She’d done some rough calculation on how long it would take her to rebuild her castle, all on her lonesome, without horses to haul or tools to build with, and decided her time could be better served learning how to do backflips on the moon or play the mandolin upside down while drinking a tankard of ale. 

Which is when the dragon shows up, probably back to exact his nefarious revenge now that he’s woken up from his nap. 

“What are you doing here?” the dragon calls, alighting next to the pile of wood she’d quickly cobbled together. She’s not very good at this, but she’s always understood architects made little scale models before they attempted anything. If her scale model of sticks happens to be a fairly accurate representation of her _entire_ kingdom at the moment, well, so be it. 

“Building a tree house,” Elizabeth explains, not bothering with any of her princess-y courtesy this time. After all, the infernal creature had burnt down her court and everything in it, even Lady Maggie, who she’d also never liked much, but in this desperate time was coming to miss more and more by the moment. “You should eat me now. I don’t want to build this tree house only for you to set it on fire.” 

“You should’ve let me eat that Ronald fellow,” the dragon replies, somewhat smugly if she had to guess. 

“Probably,” she answers glumly, trying to get her stick model to stay up straight. “But then his parents probably would’ve put me on trial for negligent homicide.” 

“Oh poopy,” the dragon says, suddenly cross, “People feeling sorry for themselves taste awful.” 

Elizabeth snorts. “Do forgive me, next time you come to burn down my castle and eat me, I will try to be deliriously happy.” She mutters under her breath, “Some chemical enhancement may be required.” 

“That’s what you’re moaning about? That ugly grey stone thingy?”

Elizabeth rolls her eyes. The sticks immediately collapse right as she’s gotten them just so. She knocks the whole thing over with a loud “Pah!” 

The dragon sighs. “Well, I shall just have to help you build a new grey stone thingy. Perhaps we can paint it green before I eat you.” He looks down his scaly back. “I like green.” 

Elizabeth stares up at him. Apparently moping princesses must taste really miserable, because he was completely willing to eat that over-perfumed dullard, Ronald, and here he is offering to help her erect a new palace so that she’ll be happy when he eats her. There is of course a tremendous hole in his logic and she should probably just insist he eat her now, after all, how good can dragons be at crafting palaces? But some totally senseless part of her is rather interested to see what kind of insane castle (green, obviously) a fearsome dragon who lives in a dirty cave would build. 

“Alright,” she replies, hands on her hips, “I will taste much better if I have a castle built on a mountain.” 

“Feh, mountains,” the dragon says, voice brimming with disdain.

“The only place you haven’t scorched into the ground besides the mountain is that mosquito-infested swamp. Nobody would be happy with a castle in a nasty swamp.” 

The dragon grumbles of course, as dragons are wont to do, but he’s determined to have a better-tasting princess, so he flies her up to the mountain so she can start planning in earnest. 

She needs a lot of materials—she’d realized that early on, so she sets him on fetch-and-carry missions, which of course nets her a cease and desist order from the "traumatized" Duke So-and-So. She’s still too busy trying to get her scale model to look like she wants it to do anything but glare at the sheepish messenger. How in the name of all that is holy did they even find her atop a mountain? 

The dragon has a number of opinions on her castle. Grey is ugly, the receiving hall has to be big enough for dragons even if they have no interest in spending time inside castles—too awkward to burn them, she’s made to understand, aaaaaaaaand he wants centralized plumbing. 

“The garderrobe smelt horrible when I burnt it,” he explains. 

Elizabeth is getting very good at rolling her eyes. 

He gets her some very nice white marble—the better to paint it green—and she thinks he may have liberated some of the furnishings from Duke So-and-so’s estate.

“Dragon, you need to stop grabbing so many tables and chairs,” she tells him, “we don’t have anywhere to put them!” 

“Nonsense, make your model bigger, this is a very nice chair,” he says, shaking a chaise longue gilded with silver leaf at her. 

And that is how she ends up with a very extravagant ever-expanding marble fortress atop a mountain. It’s a nice castle, she’s got to give him that. Most of his suggestions were pretty sound, and in the interest of her gustatory benefits, he’d deferred to most of her wishes. 

On the day she has him set the last stone in the wall, he turns to her and says, “Hah! You are happy, and I am hungry. Win win.” 

“Dragon,” she protests, “I am most ardently not happy.” 

“Why not?” he replies, “It’s much better than that shack you used to live in.” 

Ignoring the fact that he called her ancestral home a ‘shack,’ she points out she’s been sleeping in a grubby grocery bag. A drafty grocery bag. She’d settle for some socks and underwear, but if the dragon wants her happy before he eats her, she wouldn’t mind a few spring dresses or a new set of footie pajamas. 

“You are so much work!” the dragon wails. She shrugs, remorseless. 

“You were the one who said unhappy princesses weren’t appetizing.” 

The dragon huffs and puffs, walking in circles like a cat with its back up. After a long couple of hours pouting, while she sits on her sprawling front steps inspecting her nails, he finally turns to her and says, “I’ve invested far too much effort to eat stringy revolting princesses now.” 

She nods consolingly. “Indeed.” 

The dragon resolves to go steal her a couple of outfits, but Elizabeth, not entirely certain his sharp claws could handle fabric without damaging it, and also convinced she’s got enough upcoming lawsuits to keep a cabal of judges employed, nixes that idea. 

“No more stealing. You’ll have to give me some of your treasure so I can go buy new…” she plucks at the frayed edges of the paper bag, “er…attire.” 

“I have never paid so much for dinner in my life!” 

Elizabeth tries to look contrite. “Sorry.” 

“Princesses are the worst. The absolute worst.” But he still flies off to his cave and returns barely moments later with a sizable chest full of gold. 

“Ah, very good, Dragon,” she says, “I shall have a splendid closet filled with pretty clothing.” 

Elizabeth may be the most familiar with dragon mannerisms on the entire earth, having spent rather an awful lot of time with one by now, but that’s still not very familiar. Nevertheless, she thinks she detects the dragon giving her an eye-roll of his own. 

Soon her marble castle is overflowing with bolts of fabric and seamstresses (only the sturdiest sort, mind you, who could withstand a dragon exhaling smoke over everything in sight and complaining loudly all through fittings) and all kinds of buttons and zippers and trim. One would never expect that outfitting herself with a fairly rudimentary set of dresses would take longer than building a marble castle atop a mountain, but somehow the Dragon even managed to make his opinions on her bustles and hemlines known. 

“Now who’s wasting time?” she shouts through her tower window, after getting stuck with a needle for the fiftieth time. The dragon sits outside, stooped to eye-level and providing unneeded commentary. 

“You ran around in a brown paper sack, excuse me for trying to impart some taste,” the dragon replies, obviously displeased. 

“Not by choice!” she shouts back. 

The dragon makes a rude noise and flies off for the night and so it goes. 

Eventually, however, Elizabeth’s new clothes are completed, the last stitch is laid and the final button affixed, and the dragon returns. 

He’s gotten very excited, even shown up with a bottle of hot sauce to douse her in. “Get ready!” he cries, advancing upon her. 

“No, Dragon, I am _not_ happy!” she shouts, throwing up a hand to halt him. 

“I am not finding you another prince!” he answers, outraged. 

Elizabeth shudders at the thought of any princes the dragon might try to saddle her with, which is very much not the point. She shakes her head. “I don’t want to be eaten.” 

“Too bad,” he replies, crossing his unwieldy clawed paws like a disgruntled teenager. 

“I will never be happy knowing I’m going to be eaten.” 

The dragon stares at her and stares at her. He heaves a very great sigh. “I suppose I will just have to take you by surprise.” 

Elizabeth stares at her beautiful mountain castle and her lovely new dresses. She smiles. “Indeed, by surprise it would have to be.” 

The dragon offers his paw to shake and Elizabeth takes it, sealing the deal. 

Elizabeth’s kingdom had always been nice, the best for miles around, she was absolutely sure. But now there’s a dragon protecting it, watching over her little country from his cave, because invasions are upsetting. No doubt it is the nicest, safest, richest kingdom in all the world. After all, the dragon had to keep his meal happy if he ever wanted to eat it.


End file.
